Joseph Jacobs, B.A.

Formerly President of the Jewish Historical Society of England; Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of History, Madrid; New York City.

AARON OF CANTERBURY –
English exegete, mentioned in "Minḥat Yehudah" (The Offering of Judah) by Judah ben Eliezer on Deut. xxvi. 2, in association with Rashi and R. Jacob of Orleans, and thus, seemingly, of the twelfth century. But a passage in the...

AARON, SON OF THE DEVIL" –
The name given to a portrait or caricature of an English Jew of the year 1277, drawn on a forest-roll of the county of Essex, in connection with a number of fines imposed on some Jews and Christians who pursued a doe that had...

AARON OF LINCOLN –
His Transactions. English financier; born at Lincoln, England, about 1125; died 1186. He is first mentioned in the English pipe-roll of 1166 as creditor of King Henry II. for sums amounting to £616 12s. 8d. (about $3,083, the...

AARON OF YORK (Fil Josce) –
Jewish financier and chief rabbi of England; born in York before 1190; died after 1253. He was probably the son of Josce of York, the leading figure in the York massacre of 1190. Aaron appears to have obtained some of his...

ABERDEEN (Scotland) –
The chief city of northern Scotland, capital of Aberdeenshire. Jews have but recently settled in this city, the only synagogue of which (at 34 Marischal street) was founded in 1893. Six years later the whole Jewish population...

ABRAHAM'S OAK –
A famous and venerable oak (Quercus pseudo-coccifera) which still stands at Mamre, half an hour's journey west of Hebron, and is surrounded by a wall over which it projects. Josephus probably refers to it ("Ant." i. 10, § 4), or...

ABRAHAM OF HAMBURG –
Warden and leading spirit of the Ashkenazic community of London; born at Hamburg after 1650; died at London after 1721. By inducing the shamas (sexton) of the only Ashkenazic synagogue at that time surreptitiously to mutilate...

ABRAHAM BEN ISAAC AUERBACH –
Liturgical poet of the seventeenth century; born at Kosfeld and became rabbi at Münster. During a visit to Amsterdam in 1675, he was made acquainted with an attempt by a clergyman, named Christopher Bernard, to asperse the Jews,...

ABRAHAM IBN SHOSHAN OF CAIRO –
Rabbi in Cairo, Egypt, in the sixteenth century, who together with RaDBAZ (David ibn Abi Zimra), gave a decision on a point of ritual.Bibliography: Michael, Or ha-Ḥayyim, No. 234.J.

ABRAHAM BEN SOLOMON OF ZAMORA –
Eschatological writer of the thirteenth century. His work exists in the library of Munich (Codex 47, 7d), but has not yet been published. It has been conjectured by Zunz that one of Abraham ibn Ḥiyyah's works was dedicated to...

ABU TALIB –
Imaginary name of the Mohammedan disputant in the controversial epistles of Samuel Maroccanus (see Abbas, Samuel abu Naṣr ibn). The name is given in some editions as Abucalis or Abucalib. The manuscripts in which the name occurs...

ACHBOR –
1. Father of Baal-hanan (comp. Hannibal), king of Edom (Gen. xxxvi. 38, 39, and in the corresponding list of I Chron. i. 49). It has been suggested that the name implies a species of totemism (W. R. Smith, "Kinship and Marriage...

ACTS OF PARLIAMENT RELATING TO THE JEWS OF ENGLAND –
The legislature of England expresses its will in formal documents known as Acts, and thus the record of the legislative enactments concerning the Jews of England is to be found in the collected Acts known as the "Statutes of the...

ADEN –
Port in western Arabia on the shores of the Red Sea, near the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb; a British possession since 1839. In 1891 its population was 41,910. In 1881 there were in Aden 2,121 Jews, including 125 Beni Israel from...

ADLER –
A family that came originally from Frankfort, but which has been connected for more than a century with the chief rabbinate of England. Tebele Schiff, who was chief rabbi of London, was, it is true, only connected by marriage...

ADLER, CYRUS –
Librarian of the Smithsonian Institution; founder of the American Jewish Historical Society. He was born at Van Buren, Arkansas, Sept. 13, 1863, and was educated at the Philadelphia High School, University of Pennsylvania (B.A.,...

ÆSOP'S FABLES AMONG THE JEWS –
India the Probable Source. Recent research has shown an intimate relation between the fables associated with the name of Æsop and the jatakas, or birth-stories of the Buddha. Sakyamuni is represented in the jatakas as recording...

AFGHANISTAN –
Country of Asia, lying to the northwest of India. The Afghans themselves have a tradition that they are descendants of the lost Ten Tribes. They were carried away by Buktunasar (Nebuchadnezzar) to Hazarah, which they identify...

AFRICA –
Biblical Age. The Bible has no general name for Africa, any more than it has for Europe or Asia. The word "Ham," from the Hebrew root (to be hot), which is applied in the later Psalms (lxxviii. 51; cv. 23, 27; cvi. 22) to Egypt,...

AGUILAR, EPHRAIM LOPEZ PEREIRA, BARON D' –
Second Baron d'Aguilar; born in Vienna in 1739; died at London, 1802. In 1757 he was naturalized in England, where he had settled with his father. He married in 1758 the daughter of Moses Mendes da Costa, who is reported to have...

ALEXANDER –
An English family of printers and translators that flourished during the latter part of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth. The founder of the firm was probably A. Alexander (ben Judah Loeb), whose...

ALEXANDRE, ALBERT –
Chess-player; born at Hohenfeld-on-the-Main, Germany, about 1766; died in London, Nov. 16, 1850. Most of his life was spent in Paris, where he was one of the most frequent habitués of the Café de la Régence; but he returned for...

ALFONSINE TABLES –
A series of astronomical tables giving the exact hours for the rising of the planets and fixed stars; compiled at Toledo at the request of Alfonso X. of Castile about the year 1252, the date given in the Latin editions being the...

ALMAGEST –
The Arabic title of the astronomical work of Claudius Ptolemy (flourished 150), entitled by him μαθηματική σύνταξις, in order to distinguish it from another σύνταξις of Ptolemy's, devoted to astrology. The Almagest contains a...

AMADOR DE LOS RIOS, JOSÉ –
Spanish historian of the Jews in Spain and Portugal, and archeologist; born 1818; died at Seville, 1878. De los Rios was for some time inspector-general of public instruction in Spain. He wrote many works archeological in...